Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose t...
England’s National Curriculum states, in an echo of Matthew Arnold’s words from his book Culture and Anarchy (Arnold, 1869), that teachers should provide ‘pupil...
Cottenham Primary School’s (CPS) 2015 Ofsted inspection resulted in a ‘requires improvement’ rating, necessarily leading towards a refocused vision for the scho...
The when, how and why of assessment are ultimately dependent on what is being assessed, namely the curriculum. Like many schools, we spent a lot of time redesig...
As a memory researcher and teacher-educator, I sometimes get a negative reaction when I talk about improving teachers’ understanding of human memory. Am I sugge...
Deepening knowledge through vocabulary learning
Effective vocabulary instruction: The underlying reasoning and research
Isabel L Beck and Margaret G McKeown
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Amy’s geography teacher has asked the class to prepare a short presentation about rainforest ecosystems. To plan this, Amy reflects on how she learned best ...
In recent years, there appears to have been a growing trend for school teachers and leaders to be shunning educational fads and gimmicks in favour of a more evi...
Changing perspectives
When I began teaching, back in 2003, I was frequently told that I was a teacher first and subject specialist second. There was a prevalen...
The US ‘decade of the brain’ in the 1990s saw the launch of a number of educational programmes that claimed to be ‘brain-based’. These were usually unscientific...
Retrieval practice, or reconstructing knowledge by bringing it to mind from your memory, has been shown by numerous researchers to improve student learning (see...
On a societal level we often see sleep as an afterthought, taking time away from our other pursuits. To an adult, this may be staying late in the office. For ...
It’s Monday morning, a full day of classes, and you’ve just remembered that the marking you spent Sunday evening doing is locked in your car. You’ve already rec...
Numeracy skills measured at age five, prior to the start of primary school, are strong predictors of later academic achievement in both reading and maths (Dunca...
It is often difficult to find research on a group of children that exactly fits the profile or diagnosis of a child that you are working with; there are many ...
Assessment is an important part of any education system. Without assessment, we cannot be sure that students are learning anything, because, as many countries h...
What are tests and questioning good for?
Jonathan Firth
The 'testing effect', widely referred to now as 'retrieval practice', is a well-known psychological ph...
Nothing polarises a staffroom discussion more than technology. The moment interactive whiteboards, virtual learning environments or mobile devices are brought ...
Imagine what a difference it would make if children knew what they were good at and what they had to do to improve.' With these stirring words, our trainer exto...
For four years I have taught in a wide variety of schools and I have always been confused about how we use the word 'validity'. I knew the word had something to...
